Creative Labs has opened up the doors to its ALchemy Project to enable hardware acceleration for DirectSound and EAX audio algorithms in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Vista. The Alchemy Project is currently in its beta stages and intends to work around Microsoft’s audio limitations in Windows Vista due to the removal of the Hardware Abstraction Layer, or HAL.

Microsoft’s removal of the HAL removes the software layer required by digital signal processors to enable hardware acceleration for various 3D audio algorithms including DirectSound3D and EAX in pre-Vista games. Nevertheless, digital signal processors that support OpenAL can still take advantage of hardware audio acceleration.

The Alchemy Project intends to work around Windows Vista limitations by translating DirectSound calls into OpenAL – essentially an OpenAL wrapper. In order to take advantage of the ALchemy Project OpenAL wrapper the installer copies a few necessary files into each game directory.

The automated installer will install the necessary files into each game directory, if there is official support for the game. Officially supported games include:

Battle for Middle Earth 2

Call of Duty

Call of Duty 2

Diablo 2

Everquest 2

FEAR

Full Spectrum Warrior

Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers

Guild Wars

GTA: San Andreas

Hitman: Blood Money

Max Payne 2

Midieval 2: Total War

Neverwinter Nights

Neverwinter Nights 2

NOLF 2

Rome: Total War

If the installer does not officially support your game, Creative Labs provides a guide for advanced users to take advantage of the OpenAL wrapper. Manually adding game support requires the copying of two files – dsound.dll and dsound.ini. On occasion, the unsupported game will work with the default configuration settings. If the default settings do not work, the dsound.ini file is tweak able for better performance. Available settings in the dsound.ini include Buffer, Duration, DisableDirectMusic and MaxVoiceCount settings.

For the initial beta phase of Creative ALchemy, we made the decision to concentrate on products based on the X-Fi chip. Games developers have put a lot of effort into supporting the advanced features of this chip so we want to provide the best level of support that we can for our most recent hardware. Support for Audigy 2 and 4 class products will be determined as the current beta progresses and we are able to assess the quality of the beta and overall demand for Creative ALchemy.

Users fortunate enough to have an X-Fi based sound card can download the ALchemy Project installer from the Creative ALchemy Project download page.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

I love the X-Fi, but saying x50 is just going to upset different minded people :P It's BETTER, but x50... depends on how much you care about sound in the first place. Some just want a little more clarity and 50x will probably seem like alot for them.

It is x50 times better than old built in soundcards tough! Used once recently and at first I thought something was misconfigured or broken (I've been using Audigy2 and X-Fi since their respective launch date, so I'm not used to crappy sound :P ). Then I realised nothing was "wrong" and decided it wasn't worth playing on that machine as I had intended (thief, a game where good sound is essential). The whole experience would have been ruined imo :(